Cultural evolutionary modeling of patterns in language change : exercises in evolutionary linguistics

Abstract

This thesis describes the use of an evolutionary linguistic approach in the study of language change in a series of case studies. The main purpose of this exercise is to get a better insight in the mechanisms that have played a role in the respective cases of change.

Human language can be considered an evolutionary system. Speakers transmit linguistic utterances in communication and these utterances can be subject to both mutation and selection. As such, a person’s linguistic knowledge, based on the set of linguistic utterances he or she has encountered, might gradually change over time.

In the case studies, computer models are used to simulate and investigate patterns in change, such as the tendency for words to change from lexical to functional meaning instead of vice versa and the one form-one meaning tendency. Another investigated pattern is the development of the Dutch verb ‘krijgen’, which shows a commonly found change from agentive to non-agentive meaning. Finally, a case study is presented in which the historic development of the verb ‘krijgen’ is reconstructed on the basis of synchronic variation in the use of the verb, using phylogenetic reconstruction methods